Introducing the Monzo Transparency Hub

While you’re waiting for an update from the team - this use case sounds quite similar to the reason why a dedicated notifications tab might be useful.

I expect Hugo’s comments on siloing certain notifications, in the below topic apply here too -

I can definitely see a need for this sort of thing once Monzo integrates with other providers & there’s a lot more feed items in the feed. But at the moment, I personally don’t find them that hard to manage…

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Hey Mike, I don’t think the principles which help us decide if information is ‘feed-worthy’ will change drastically from the set of considerations we use now. Ultimately, we see a lot of value in filtering out noise and presenting you with the relevant information in this part of the app. @hugo can probably shed some more light here.

All transactional data which appears in the feed is stored by us forever, but this won’t be directly linked to the individual customer’s data once they leave the bank.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by misposts? For any duplicate or erroneous transactions, the original transaction and the relevant credit back to the customer will both remain as part of the transaction history.

That’s a very good question. At this stage we don’t really have a defined set of principles about what should or should not remain in the feed… same for notifications. That will probably change at some point, just not yet :wink:

So far we’ve been making the call with every new thing we produce, based on our experience and a fair amount of user testing.

Something else you’d like to know we do is to always release this kind of feature first to a small proportion of our user-base and wait for their reaction. So if we get it wrong (we sometimes do), only a few of our users are affected and we can fix it before rolling out to the remaining ~99%. I hope it makes sense :slight_smile:

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Thanks @hugo Hopefully this will be something to think about as the service and range of items develops so that the feed fulfils a consistent function as well as responding to potentially inconsistent feedback. It will be good to hear how the approach to the feed is developing as part of the transparency hub. What different users want from it and how these wishes are squared will be interesting!
Not sure what’s going to happen when you start introducing items from third party APIs to the feed :grin:

There’s a big piece of work to be done precisely about that.

We haven’t decided yet, one alternative is to try to curate and “approve” integrations and only let them send notifications or even feed items if they follow a set of rules.

Another alternative would be to make it a bit more open but give powerful tools to users to tune what kind of actions want to authorise and integration to do (from “this app can see my balance” to “this app can send me notifications”).

The right solution would probably be somewhere in between :slight_smile:

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Hi @Naji By mispost I was referring to say someone quoting a wrong nine digit code on a credit meaning the credit ended up with the wrong user. Or a fraudster misdirection credits to his account by changing remitted details through fraud. Cheques sent to Monzo for collection could be keyed by mistake to the wrong account.

Collected cheques could be unpaid. etc.

Even with the best systems things get onto the wrong account or have to be reversed.

While I’m guessing that you have a modulus check digit in account numbers to reduce the incidence of error some misposts could result.

The approach on whether to contra or remove the transaction entirely could depend on the nature of the mispost. E. G. If crime is involved not alerting the criminal to detection.

I think there should be a real emphasis that the bank acts first and foremost for the CUSTOMER. All to often, with traditional banks, it seems they are being run for the regulator and compliance teams. And while that is of course important, that should NOT drive the business. Which it now seems to be doing in big banks. As a customer of a big bank I feel they would sacrifice my interests (and confidentiality) in a heartbeat, when the bank should have its loyalty to the customer. I am hoping Monzo will be different in this regard.

Hi Jonathan, Thomas, Head of Risk at Monzo here…

I couldn’t agree more - our goal is to act for you and all our customers first, ensuring we give you the best banking experience possible…

Our regulator is mainly concerned with the stability of the Bank (i.e. do we have enough money) and whether we treat our customers fairly, so I actually don’t know if they are truly to blame. I think the real problem lies in the way regulations and laws are interpreted … this is what causes frustrating situations for customers as a result of poor or overzealous interpretation of rules or guidelines.

Here we’re trying very hard to avoid that situation at Monzo, so while we always want to be fully compliant with the rules and regulations, we equally will ensure that in doing so, we don’t impact the experience or interests of our customers, (that being said there are certain situations which require us to follow more strict rules that relate to Fraud, Financial Crime and Money Laundering rules – which I’m sure you’d want us to adhere to!)

Hope this makes sense and is helpful!

Thomas

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Thomas

Thanks for the reply, which makes sense. As you say, it may well be that the internal compliance people in banks, in a “backside covering approach”, go over the top and jeopardise customer relationships. By all means follow the rules, but never forget the customer is king and that is key

…and bonuses? Also Ownership and Governance.

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I would like to see “Ownership” and “Governance” added as headings to the transparency dashboard.

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I’m surprised to see nothing on privacy of users’ data: who has access to transaction info, which third-parties it is or will be shared with, etc.

I came back to check for it because there’s been several questions about it recently, particularly with regard to third-parties such as Flux and Tail.

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Building on this, and as raised in the thread about Monzo-to-Monzo payments, the transparency page should provide details on how Monzo uses data on your phone which it asks for access to (contacts, photos, etc), including what gets sent off the phone, in what form, and where to. The second post in that thread details this for contacts data with regards to P2P payments, but I think there needs to be a statement that covers the app as a whole, and all categories of data Monzo requests permissions for.

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I would like to see statistics about flexible and part-time working at Monzo. In particular, it would be interesting to see to what extent you find it hard or impossible to facilitate the desire for flexible working and what the reasons for this are.

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The ‘Product’ section of the Transparency dashboard still links through to the Trello board; perhaps it should be updated to link through to ‘Making Monzo’?

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A total breakdown of how you make money, where the main sources of revenue come from and how you optimise this.

Please upvote

Thanks

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How do people find these ancient topics :exploding_head:

Also, there is no upvote - this isn’t Reddit :laughing: :stuck_out_tongue:

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I agree with vapoto. Are savings invested responsibly, in line with targets set at the UN climate summit in Paris in 2015? How can we be sure that our savings support sustainable energy and responsible business practices (fair wages)? I know the savings are handled by separate firms but it would be helpful to clarify this to attract more members.

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There is no mention of environmental impacts of the Monzo business in the annual reports (which is a little surprising for a new~ish business). I would be interested to see the carbon impact of Monzos digital services and whether or not carbon-intensity of platforms such as AWS are at all a consideration in the decision making. Some overview and numbers in the annual reports could help form a benchmark from which to improve upon.

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Hi, I got here through the link on this website: monzo.com/transparency
I wonder: I would like have your app published on F-Droid.
They have an inclusion policy.
I wonder where and how you would like to discuss this.
You would be the first bank there, I think and having an open-source client could make a difference in transparency.